(This would just be for photography beginners and would cover the basics. Not for those hoping to turn professional or those currently practicing professionally. And sorry, I’m not currently mentoring others in business, although am flattered by the requests. :) )

I got this message via Twitter from Evan’s dad: any way to get a “sneak peak” from Sat. AM? Just one or two on your blog? Pretty please? So I edited a few photos from our session and then, when I went to post them, realized I’d oh-so-smartly deleted the database that powers this blog while I was cleaning out and making more space on my hosting account. Many thanks to my lovely host, VerveHosting.com, who fixed my database within minutes, and with whom I have been hosting for over 10 years now and highly recommend. And now I can share some of these photos!

Just one photo today while I’m in between projects. Something a little different than newborn baby loaves. :) This is Caroline Smith of Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps who performed at the Turf Club last week. They’ve got a folk-pop sound, complete with banjos and harmonicas. Writing about music is definitely not my forte so I’ll just say that Caroline Smith is cute as can be and you should go see her.

You can listen to some of their music on their MySpace page.

The newborns in all of these posts are less than two weeks old, the ideal time to for them to be photographed. Don’t wait until your little one is born to set up a newborn session; call ahead and we’ll get you a tentative date on the schedule around your due date and be flexible from there.

They also inform the audience that “people will be taking their clothes off!” So the photos, of course, contain very few articles of clothing. Being that this is somewhat of a family blog, I didn’t want to shock you too badly. So the photos are on another page. :)

Click here if you’d like to view the burlesque photos.

Lookbook

Both mayors were there; here Chris Coleman is showing us the importance of mayoral decrees.

Mason Jennings

P.O.S.

Toasting The Current with Mark Wheat.

Solid Gold

PS Mobile (free)- This is the Photoshop Mobile app. It’s pretty basic but also quite useful in it’s basicness. You can crop, rotate, flip and adjust exposure, saturation and tint. It’s also got a couple of gimmicky filters like sketch or soft focus. I start most editing in PS Mobile because I find that the iPhone underexposes in nearly every situation that isn’t BRIGHT SUN.

Camera Bag ($1.99) – This is a set of 11 basic filters. I usually check through them all but I’m guessing I end up using one of them maybe 20% of the time? The sample photos on the app page look really nice so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong but most of the filters don’t end up adding anything to my photos. It’s still probably worth the $1.99 though.

Quad Camera ($1.99) – This was fun for a couple of days and I haven’t opened it again since then, which was probably 8 months ago. It takes 4 or 8 photos in rapid succession and creates a single image file of your shots. You can alter the layout. If I purposely set out to make something with this, it could probably create some interesting things but it’s not an app that occurs to me often.

Mill Colour (Free) – I think this is my most used photo app. It’s got ten predefined filters and within those, I generally find one that I like. It’s also got freestyle adjustments for gamma, grain, saturation, brightness, etc. For the price, this really can’t be beat.

Best Camera ($2.99) – This is the app I was referencing in my last post. The filters that it has are pretty well laid out on the linked page. In addition to those, you can directly upload to a variety of places like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc., from the app, as well as participate in The Best Community. A lot of photographers swear by this app but honestly, I don’t think it’s that great. I wouldn’t buy it again.

Camera Kit ($.99) – This is supposed to emulate film processing with push and pull processing and developing methods. Unfortunately, also like film, you can’t preview the effect of the filter while you’re applying it which makes the whole process annoying long and unwieldy.
Mill Color

PanoLab (free) – This app will stitch together several photos to create a panorama. It’s free, so it’s probably worth that. I’ve made a total of zero actual panoramas, with the exception of the one I just made of my living room in the dark to test the app.

TiltShiftGen ($.99) – I love this app. In addition to saturation, brightness and contrast controls, you can apply radial or linear blur to give it a fake tilt shift effect. That’s how the three fall photos and the downtown Minneapolis photo in the entry below were edited. I use this app a lot.

FotoMuse ($2.99) – This is one of my more recent purchases so I haven’t used it a lot yet. It’s something of a grunge app. It’s got a wide variety of grungy borders and overlays. The witch’s house photo and the photo in this entry were both created with this app. It’s fun but not if you’re a photo purist.

PhoneGrafer ($1.99) – This has several color filters as well as sharpen, self-timer, etc., but it takes approximately two years for each filter to be applied and I have no patience for that. I wouldn’t recommend this one.

Polarize (free) – This gives your photo a polaroid frame and allows you to put handwriting-like text on the bottom. Very exciting.

That all being said, here are some unedited, unfiltered iPhone kitty pics. :)

(Turns out the iPhone is also good for photographing and videoing your sister modeling a Snuggie but sadly, I am not allowed to share those.)